Thought for Today
Psalm 51:10 Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.
Ecclesiastes 1:9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.
Mark 2:21 "No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made.
John 13:34 I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.
I have 2 favorite cookbooks, The New Best Recipes and Better Homes and Gardens new Cook Book. Yes, it is possible to have multiple favorites. The latter was a wedding present given to us many years ago. It was a great help for a young couple first starting out in life. There are recipes for how to boil an egg, how to make scrambled eggs and other basic dishes. There are instructions, with illustrations, for how to properly set a table. It has been much used, to the point that what remains of the cover is duct-taped together. The first book was a much more recent gift from our son. It too has been much used and treasured.
This morning, I am thinking about our proclivity for things new and improved. It is hard to buy almost anything that is not either new, improved or both. It is common to see signs advertising establishments that are “Under new management.” Do we truly believe that ‘new and improved’ inherently make things better? Sometimes the changes are improvements; sometimes the changes are merely changes. New packaging does not make a product new, nor does it make a product better.
I am not ready to go quite as far as Qoheleth, I do believe there are some things “new under the sun.” Next year our country will celebrate our 250th ‘birthday.’ Consider the world into which our fledgling nation was born. No indoor plumbing. No electricity. No automobiles. No television. “In 1876, Bell became the first to obtain a patent for an ‘apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically’, after experimenting with many primitive sound transmitters and receivers.” (en.wikipedia.org) Bell’s ‘apparatus’ was not a cellphone and certainly was not a smartphone. “The first smartphone was designed by IBM and sold by BellSouth in 1993. Known as the IBM Simon, it included a touchscreen interface for accessing its calendar, address book, calculator, and other functions. The IBM Simon is often considered the first commercially available device that could be properly referred to as a "smartphone". Apple's original iPhone in 2007 is also credited with kicking off the smartphone boom” (Bing search)
From 1776 to 2007 there were certainly things new and even things new and improved. We ‘progressed’ from having no electronic communication devices to children and adults being constantly using their smartphones. Of course, the question of that progression being progress is open to very lively debate.
The introduction of things new is not confined to electronics or to communication. When our nation was founded, doctors were still treating patients by bleeding them using leeches. Even during our very uncivil Civil War, medicine was crude and almost barbaric compared to medicine today. Pandemics like the various plagues of the Middle Ages or even like the Influenza epidemic of 1918 were devastating, in part because of the lack of effective treatments. Although there was grievous loss during the COVID pandemic, effective vaccines were developed in record time.
Not to belabor the obvious, but there is at least one thing I find most important that is neither new nor improved, not ‘under new management.’ In fact, our entire Creation is still under the management of our Creator God. From Genesis 1:1 until this very moment, God was, has been and remains the same “I AM.” “James 1:17 Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” In the words of that great hymn, Great Is Your Faithfulness, “You do not change, your compassions they fail not; all of your goodness forever will be.” God is always God.
Stay safe, thank God for God’s faithfulness, trust God,
Pastor Ray